I have very mixed feelings about Fasthosts… They occupy an uneasy niche between amateur hosting and semi-professional levels of service. I just can’t bring myself to say that their offering suits professionals, because after 2.5 years of being with them and a lot of hair lost to stress, I am moving my business away from their servers. Fasthosts aren’t the cheapest by any means, but they offer a good array of services. In theory they are reasonably priced among their peers. I give respect where it is due to their technical support team who are mostly friendly and as helpful as they can be given the limitations of their training and their remit decided by the top brass. 9 times out of 10 though I solved my own problems while trying to get them to solve them for me. First line support is often available within a couple of minutes, sometimes in more like 10 minutes on hold. They don’t offer a geographical or freephone support line so you are talking about time on hold to an 0845 number… If you have to wait for second line (actual server engineers) to talk to you, it can be 3 days before anything gets actioned and support seems unclear as to the role of 2nd line support. I have actually been told that second line support / personal engineer services are provided ‘out of hours only’ and ‘out of kindness’ by the server engineers. As I told the staff who said that “out of kindness at £120 per hour?” The main problem with Fasthosts is that they can’t/don’t really fulfill some of the offerings they have properly. They sell products like plesk for their higher end customers (on dedicated or virtual servers) and yet they fail/refuse to support it beyond mailing you documents you can find on Google. They offer personal engineer services for those with high end packages who are having problems, but only for certain tasks or problems. Other requests leave you with a blunt ‘no’ which is surreal: “Can I pay you £120 per hour to check my backup configuration and tell me it is performing properly.” ‘No’ “Why?” ‘We don’t offer that service.’ Hmm… So what is good about Fasthosts? Well, if you just want a decent dedicated server and you are confident you don’t need support and can set up your own backup system properly, then Fasthosts dedicated servers are well priced and worked very well for us. If you want shared hosting and it isn’t mission critical, it’s ok. For anyone else though I have to urge great caution. Unless you are a server supremo, you may find yourself up the creek without a paddle and out of pocket.
